Elder Will Succeed Rogers As Dean of Graduate School

J. Peterson Elder, chairman of the Department of Classics, will succeed Francis M. Rogers as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences next July. Announcement of the appointment was made yesterday by McGeorge Bundy, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Dean of the GSAS since 1949, Rogers is resigning his position in order to devote all his time to academic activities. In addition to his administrative work, he is currently teaching eight courses as a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Besides holding the chairmanship of the Classics department since 1951, the newly-chosen dean has had administrative experience on the University's Committee for Educational Policies since 1950. He said yesterday that he had not yet formulated any decisions regarding Graduate School policy, but that he would confer with faculty and students, in particular with teaching fellows, before July.

Hopes to Publish

About his resignation, Rogers said, "After nine years of part-time administrative work, however enjoyable, I am anxious to return to full-time responsibilities as a teacher of Romance Languages. In my travels during summers I have gathered material from Europe, the Azores, and South America, but I have not yet been able to publish it because of administrative responsibilities."

Before assuming the deanship, Rogers served for two years as chairman of the department of Romance Languages. Within his fields--Medieval France and Medieval and Renaissance Portugal--he is regarded as an expert, and his works on education have been translated into Spanish, French, and Chinese.

Classical Scholarship

Elder has written scholarly works on Catullus, Lucretius, Horace, Servius, and Latin Textual criticism. An editor of the Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, he is also a member of Princeton's Visiting Committee on the Classics, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philological Association, and the Monumenta Germanize Historica.

He received his A.B. summa cum laude from Williams College in 1934, and his M.A. and Ph.D. here in 1935 and 1940. He has twice held fellowships for study abroad: a Guggenheim in 1948-49, and a Sheldon in 1938-39.